So what's the purpose of making i95 crafted weapons so hard to make?

[Surian]

I understand your point of view, and that many others feel this way, but you are wrong. I've made over 10 million gil (profit) since 2.3 because I do take the time to do this. There is definitely a market out there, there is just very little supply of people who actually want to go through what's needed to do it (at least on my server). Relevance is a subjective term anyway. We might not agree on how we define relevant.

I appreciate your explaination of how you see things, but as a crafter, i would like to be able to make gear that actually gets used. I too can make money as profit if i so want to, through the means of making glamour gear or furniture, perhaps even lower level gear that people use through their journey to level 50.

But being able to make i95 weapons as your best "top" craft that cannot even be used as a stepping stone due to the rarity of its ingredients, and the prices following that should one wish to simply purchase them, is flawd. Especially so when far superior alternatives are free. It's the Darklight/Darksteel debate all over again we had back in 2.1. One could spend a good portion of their money to make something (darksteel), and put it on the market boards for a lot of gil hoping it sells to a person interested in it. But that same person could just as well run three dungeons and purchase gear (darklight) with points for "free", with minimal effort, no hoops to jump through and potentially better stats.

In the case of i95 weaponry. Why would anyone buy them outside of glamour purposes, when the amount of work one needs to put into them makes them priceless. When one could just as well do a Coil, Primal battle or spend 1300 soldiery on a superior-in-every-way weapon they can upgrade even further. Not to mention mere relics that every person at those levels should have by now.

I know we differ on the subject of relevance, and i surely am not asking to be allowed to make gear better than that obtained from todays elite content. But even if the gear you could make today was the same in power and stats as the i110 weapons, the diffirence in ease-of-accessability between the two of them is still rediculous. You would be looking at an investment of a few hours for a couple of weeks, opposed to a magnitude of millions. But lets not forget that it's not the same or better, it's several stages worse than most easy alternatives.

Crafting, as a means of making armor/weapons people want to use, is dead if this system keeps up.

[JayCommon]

But being able to make i95 weapons as your best "top" craft that cannot even be used as a stepping stone due to the rarity of its ingredients, and the prices following that should one wish to simply purchase them, is flawd. Especially so when far superior alternatives are free. It's the Darklight/Darksteel debate all over again we had back in 2.1. One could spend a good portion of their money to make something (darksteel), and put it on the market boards for a lot of gil hoping it sells to a person interested in it. But that same person could just as well run three dungeons and purchase gear (darklight) with points for "free", with minimal effort, no hoops to jump through and potentially better stats.

I absolutely agree with all of this. I also appreciate you explaining your point of view constructively, instead of just reverting to "me being a troll for not fully agreeing with you"

As far as the relevance issue, I only feel that crafting is relevant because it offers a source of income. Whether or not I have anything to actually do with that income right now is a whole different topic, but basically I am saving up for if it is going to be needed when Golden Saucer releases. So in my case, crafting is still relevant because it makes me gil. However I can completely understand your point of view, and even agree with it.

In regards to the time vs free debate of crafts vs tomes, I just don't think they will be able to remedy this with the way the game is set up. We have a token system in FFXIV and I don't see that changing during 2.x. It is always going to be easier to get the tome gear than crafted, because if you stay up-to-date with your ilevel, anything that comes out to farm tomes is going to be faceroll easy. 2.0 and 2.1 had a complete monopolized domination of the market by people that took time to level everything and didn't require anyone else to make money. This was also a flawed system because the market stayed barely above stagnant, with the rich getting richer and no middle ground in between. Based on the design of allowing everyone to do everything, they had to make further crafts/gathers as tough as they did to deter people from doing everything and artifically creating some semblance of a market again. Sure, it's possible for you to gather/craft every single thing needed for 3star items, but would you really want to? They allowed a convenience factor to segregate the market into people specializing in one or two things, because if you didn't then all of your time spent in-game would be dedicated to crafting/gathering.

I don't think crafters should be able to produce top end gear either, but I think SE should have stuck with the ilvl formula from 2.0 and 2.1. Crafter gear in 2.2 didn't even match soldiery tome gear's item level, which I think was a mistake. People can argue that i90 penta melded gear may have comparable stat weights with weathered soldiery, but I don't agree. The accumulated primary stats accrued across a full left side set trumps anything you can meld into wolfram/saurian/cashmere.

I think they should have made those three sets of gear i100 off the bat with the ability for melds. In my opinion, this would have satisfied most people (there will never be a scenario where everyone is satisfied lol). I100 crafted gear (no melds) would have been on par with soldiery gear as far as primaries go, just like I70 crafted gear (no melds) was on par with Darklight. I100 crafted gear would allow for a better secondary stat spread with melds, to offer a different type of progression to oppose weathered gear being able to be upgraded to unweathered. I100 crafted would be more than enough for anyone not interested in Coil, and would have been just as good of a stepping stone to complete later turns of coil as solidery was. And then of course, High Allagan gear could stay the same to flesh out the mix of BiS slots.

Like you said, if they continue down the current path, and don't at least make 4star (or whatever is next) crafted weapons/armor along the lines of the new set of tomes that comes with 2.4, then crafting will be just relegated to fluff vanity content. The market will continue to be dominated by the minority of people who actually care to make unusable goods, and the demand for the new glamours will always be overpriced because the supply is so small.

[Gurpsmeister]

Because just like anything since launch of this title. Glamour / vanity / fluff is the real hardcore of the game.

The pve is super easy, the pvp a joke. You want to challenge yourself in this game it's all about how much fluff you can manage to pool together.

In an ideal setting this would be the opposite. The vanity stuff would / should be easy to access by everyone for relatively little and the pve stuff / pvp stuff should have a lasting challenge to keep people about.

Instead we have desperate attempts to make people relive old content by adding more and harder to get fluff.

[Exstal]

4 pages and people didn't say the reason; it's supposed to be rare.

You don't use the weapon for actual use, you use it to look pretty. Which is why the ability to HQ was comical to me.

[Caraway]

It's honestly disappointing because while SE's crafted a rather fun and well designed crafting system (not just click and win, hurrah!) they made it so that crafting is only relevant as a means of making vanity.

I'm not sure if it is entirely Yoshi-P or because of the "hardcore elite snowflakes" but this game refuses to make crafting even a viable progression alternative. Crafting is *useful* (outside of fluff) for leveling a new job and giving them HQ gear. But once you're 50? Everything you can make as a crafter can be acquired with less effort as an adventurer. And I for one think that's wrong.

I have an armoursmith to 50, got my HQ 55 gear and then just stopped. I saw how much work goes into the new gear and what the value of that gear was and I just washed my hands of it.

I get the most enjoyment out of crafting things that people use. I crafted stuff for myself and stuff for my friends. But once we got to 50? Why bother? It'll cost so much to make something actually usable (again, outside of glamour) when we can just do some really easy dungeons for equivalent or better gear.

Despite making an engaging crafting system, SE does not like crafters.

[Xatsh]

Nothing wrong with difficult crafting items. Or things costing a ton to make.

Issue is it is all for vanity.

As others said the whole crafting and gathering system in XIV is turning into 1 huge vanity hunt. Which is not good.

They need to release these new weapons at the start of patches and make the HQ ones for example in patch 2.2 I105 with materia equivalent to the 110 ones. Make crafting have a reason to exist, make the money have some real value outside of getting a pillow to sit on or having a fancy glowing glamour.

SE is scared of RMT. Yes they could screw up the economy and all, but whether SE does it or RMT do it the effect is the same.

Game has one of the best crafting systems in the world.... but the end product is vendor trash/vanity only. I blows my mind.

[axemtitanium]

People are mistaking vanity for "easy to get". Look at the rich and famous people in real life. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on cosmetics and vanity products. When was the last time a diamond necklace was useful for something other than looking pretty? Vanity items in this game are expensive and hard to get BECAUSE they're useless, not the other way around.

[Buff_Archer]

I get that vanity should be rare. I spent a lot for a South Seas Taslisman after all (but not half as much as the ppl who paid 2 mil lol). And I liked the idea of these weapons, I glamoured my Garuda bow onto my everyone-has-one Bard relic the day glamours came out, and the acceptable side effect I chose to live with is that it lost that Zenith luster. After starting the ATMA -> Animus -> Novus upgrade path I decided my time was too damn valuable for that. If crafters could have afforded to make this weapon they would have done so and I would have bought it, but it's very telling that there's hardly any for sale- it's not worth it to them. And it's not worth it to me, I've got a Weathered Rosenbogen anyway (not through hunts I always have to say that) so the weapon would be a lot to spend to drop to ilvl 95 from 100 (110 when I score a sands).

For what these weapons cost they should do more. Knowing what they take to create, if I saw someone with one I wouldn't think 'Oh cool!' it would probably be more like 'Wow how much free time do they have on their hands...". For what goes into this, the Vortex bow shouldn't just sparkle, it should fly me places while playing trance music.

[Fendred]

The guy who worked on the economy for FFXI (don't remember his name off the top of my head) can only do so much to make things become affordable or available when the design of that side of the game and the combat/progression side of it are in conflict with one another.

[Alx789]

In my world crafted weapon seems to be unusable. Prices are 10-15M gil.
I craft at lvl 25-30 and can get about 1M gil per week from sales. So, i need to work 10+ weeks for one weapon item.
I have also i90 gear and weapon which allows me to visit expert roulette, syrcus tower an take part in a hunt groups. This allows me to get i110 weapon in 3 weeks. And this i110 will be better than crafted one. So, i have no reason to buy it.
Who will buy such weapon - crafters? No reason, too long. Combatants? They will get drops or soldiery weapon. Maybe something changes in the future, but now... I think that crafter should have possibility to fully equip himself using his noncombatant skills, but now it's not so.